Do financial boogeymen haunt your dreams? You’re not alone. Today, we’re diving into the worries that keep even the most seasoned finance nerds up at night. From concerns about index fund concentration to the fear of market manipulation and obsession with asset allocation, this episode tackles it all with insight and a healthy dose of perspective.
Joining Joe and OG in the basement is an all-star panel: Paula Pant from Afford Anything, Jesse Cramer from Best Interest, and Dr. Jordan Grumet from Earn and Invest. Together, they’ll share strategies to conquer financial fears by staying calm, focusing on the big picture, and sticking to sound investment principles.
And don’t miss the kickoff of the year-long Stacking Benjamins Trivia Challenge! It’s packed with brain-busting questions, lively debates, and, yes, the occasional cat butt reference (because it’s still the basement, after all).
What’s Inside Today’s Episode:
- Meet the Contributors: Paula, Jesse, and Dr. Grumet join the crew.
- Index Fund Concentration: Are index funds too risky? The panel weighs in.
- Addressing Financial Fears: From market scams to fraud and manipulation, here’s how to keep your cool.
- Trivia Challenge Kickoff: A brand-new Stacking Benjamins tradition begins.
- Market Efficiency and Insider Trading: Can you really beat the market?
- Asset Allocation Obsession: Why overthinking your portfolio can be your worst enemy.
- Upcoming Episodes: What’s next on the Stacking Benjamins calendar?
Highlights from the Episode:
- Index Fund Concentration: The crew discusses whether having too much of the market in a few big players is a recipe for disaster.
- Financial Fears: Practical advice for keeping anxiety at bay when market volatility hits.
- Market Scams and Frauds: How to spot them and protect yourself.
- Trivia Time: A heated debate over billionaire counts, complete with unforgettable banter.
- Asset Allocation: Tips for avoiding paralysis by analysis and focusing on long-term strategies.
Resources Mentioned in the Episode:
- Learn more from Paula Pant at Afford Anything.
- Explore Jesse Cramer’s insights at Best Interest.
- Dive into Dr. Jordan Grumet’s conversations at Earn and Invest.
Tune in now and learn how to leave your financial fears in the dust while keeping your money goals on track.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Watch On Our YouTube Channel:
Our Topic:
Index fund concentration (Apex Money)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- The “Magnificent 7” stocks overweighting.
- Stock market history.
- Effectiveness of index investing.
- Diversification.
- Small-cap tilt.
- Indices are self-cleansing.
- Invest as soon as you have money.
- Black swan events are rare and unpredictable.
- Create a financial plan and stick to it.
- Avoid emotional investing.
- Start investing despite psychological barriers.
- Small mistakes are okay in investing.
- Financial planning gets detailed after $100K in savings.
- Diversify beyond single-fund portfolios.
- Optimize portfolios with the efficient frontier.
- Persistence leads to success.
- Many are dissatisfied with savings levels.
- Optimism can counter financial pessimism.
- Market timing rarely works; invest consistently.
- Know your risk tolerance.
- Focus on actionable goals over rare events.
- Diversified portfolios need ongoing management.
- Visual aids simplify financial concepts.
- Saving and investing habits build stability.
- Compounding rewards long-term investment.
- Seek professional advice for tailored plans.
- Asset allocation.
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Jesse Cramer

Another thanks to Jesse Cramerfor joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Jesse on his show, The Best Interest at The Best Interest – Complex Personal Finance Made Easy Podcast Series – Apple Podcasts.
Learn how you can work with Jesse by visiting The Best Interest – Invest in Knowledge.
Doc G

Another thanks to Doc G for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Doc G on his show, Earn & Invest podcast at Earn & Invest on Apple Podcasts.
Check out his latest book The Purpose Code: How to unlock meaning, maximize happiness, and leave a lasting legacy.
Paula Pant

Check Out Paula’s site and amazing podcast: AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- How many billionaires are there in the world (plus one for the Stacker who reaches it next)?
Mentioned in today’s show
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday when we’re joined by a mentor who knows all about digging deeper into your money mindset, host of the More Money Podcast, Jessica Moorhouse.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Finding More Cheddar Navigating Volatile Markets (SB1634).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: Hey, shake and bake Cal Woo. Shake Night [00:00:08] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:00:23] I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And finally, it’s a normal, straightforward, everyday regular Friday episode of the Stacking Benjamin Show. What does that mean? Well, look, here’s our recipe for some good old home-cooked finance chat. We start with a compelling topic like the one we’ve got today, things we worry about as finance. [00:00:45] Nerds and how to combat those fears. Cool topic, right? And then we add in some great contributors, like the woman behind the Afford Anything podcast and YouTube page, Paula Pants. And also like this guy from the Best Interest Podcast, Jesse Kramer. And how about our partner from over at Earn and Invest, Dr. [00:01:07] Jordan Grumet, AKA Doc G. Then I throw all that into a Ziploc bag and I shake it up real good. And what happens then? Shake it, bake baby, shake it, bake well, you know, I mean that that means they’re gonna share some wisdom and insights and stuff, but it sounds way cooler when you say shake a bait. But that’s not all. [00:01:27] On today’s episode, they’ll also kick off our year long. Stacking Benjamin’s trivia challenge. And now a guy who I think of first when I think of challenged, it’s Go Salt Sea. Hi. Wow. We’re starting off the, your right, Doug. We’re firing on all cylinders today. [00:01:49] Joe: Baby shake and bake and challenge the same intro. [00:01:51] Welcome back to uh, well to another normal episode of the Stacky Benjamin Show, first one of 2025. We’ve had so many special episodes in a row. Let’s say hello to the team that joins us today. Let’s start off with the woman from the Afford Anything podcast. Paula Panta is here in a nice, bright green like happy sweater. [00:02:12] Paula: Yes. Yeah. I love bringing bright, cheerful kind of springtime colors to the gloom of winter. I never understood, you know, why is it that when the trees are bare and the skies are dark, when it’s gloomy outside and it gets dark at 4:00 PM why does everybody wear dark colors? Why not snaz it up with some brightness? [00:02:33] Doug: Well, you see Paul, for the answer to that, we’re gonna have to go all the way back to the Victorian times to discuss is this such a cleanliness and, and their inability to clean up horse poop. [00:02:45] Joe: Well, I was gonna say though, uh, Paula, especially New Yorkers, I noticed I had a raincoat ’cause it rained like hell when I was there in December. [00:02:52] With uh mm-hmm. You and, uh, Jordan and og and uh, so I had on this red raincoat, I felt way out of, I felt like I was way too colorful. [00:03:01] Paula: Right, exactly. And, uh, well, I mean, but to Doug’s point, new Yorkers also kind of have a problem with cleaning up horse poop. So [00:03:09] Joe: maybe Yes. Is that what the mayor’s worried about these days? [00:03:12] Maybe they like it. It’s rats. Rats is the bigger problem here. [00:03:15] Paula: We have a rat czar. We have an official rat czar. It’s amazing. And [00:03:18] Joe: the guy who’s the rat czar of this podcast, I got no idea where that’s headed. Uh, doc g Jordan GRS here. How are you man? I thought it was [00:03:25] Jordan: gonna be me. I was about to say, I didn’t know if you were gonna zig or zag there. [00:03:29] Yeah. Were you going to Jesse, who gets to be the rat czar? You keep on talking about, this is our normal Friday episode and I was like, there’s nothing normal here. Nothing normal here at all. There might not be. Well, how’s the book tour going my friend? It is busy. If you’ve been seeing a lot of me lately, it’s because guess what? [00:03:46] I had a book come out. I’ve been trying to get out there and get the messages of the book across and uh, just trying to celebrate, you know, it’s a big thing [00:03:54] Joe: when you have a book drop. And I love, by the way, all the positive reviews I’m seeing, like, not even positive glowing reviews I’m seeing of it. Of course well deserved. [00:04:02] I was meeting one-on-one with a stacker named Hannah Today. Hey Hannah. And I told Hannah, I go, you know, I got this book I think you’d really like. She goes, doc, she’s book purpose code. I’m like, yes, exactly. She goes, I’m reading it right now. It’s so good. So, so, so good. [00:04:15] Jordan: One of the funny things is when people are talking to you about the book and they start using your terminology, so it’s pretty cool. [00:04:21] That is good. Like little p. Yep, exactly. [00:04:24] Joe: Yes, yes. Speaking a little PI [00:04:28] Jesse: knew that was coming. Thanks, doc. You set me up. [00:04:32] Joe: I had a positive one all set up, Jesse, and then he reloaded, uh, Jesse Kramer. How are you man? [00:04:38] Jesse: Doing well, doing well. All this, uh, snow talk. I mean, at this point in my life is in gray scale here in Rochester. [00:04:44] I mean, haven’t seen the blue sky for weeks. Uh, you know, you can see behind me. Look at that. Yes. Do you see any color back [00:04:50] Joe: there? No. Nothing. No. But it is this nice winter landscape, this winter wonderland, which I think ends in June in Rochester, New York. Isn’t that about right? [00:05:00] Jesse: It’ll smelt by June. Yeah, that’s what they say. [00:05:03] That’s a, that’s an old Rochester, uh, adverb proverb. One of those metaphor aphorism. [00:05:08] Joe: All the above. Uh, Jesse, you, you would agree with me on this one because I totally agree with what Paula said about the bright colors, but I also, man, after the holiday season, I’m okay with taking down the Christmas trees. [00:05:21] You know, that represents a specific day. But why do we take down all those pretty lights like that? That’s the one that gets me. We should leave the lights up and just call them winter lights. [00:05:29] Jesse: Joe, you should meet the guy in my neighborhood, who by far he had the most lights. I don’t wanna criticize him here on such a popular show, ’cause he is probably tuning in, but he could be a little more selective in what he chooses to put up in his yard last year. [00:05:43] It took him till after Easter to bring them all down. My, it was St. Patrick’s Day and there was still a nativity scene out there. [00:05:49] Joe: You live next to Clark Griswold, [00:05:52] Jesse: you know, hey, different, different strokes for different folks, you know? It’s fine. It’s fine. [00:05:57] Joe: Well, I’m super excited that all three of you here today to kick off a quote, normal episode of the Stacky Benjamin Show. [00:06:04] You know what, today I got inspired when I was reading our friend Jim Wang’s piece on index fund concentration. Jim writes, at Apex money go to apex money.com. He also curates a lot of good stuff there, but he shares his, uh, fantastic thinking there as well. And, and Jim wrote this, he wrote, I love investing with index funds, low cost, low thinking, diversified, safe. [00:06:31] What scares me a little is that the Top 10 holdings account for like 40% of the index, and it’s mostly technology. I still invest in index funds, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. The challenge with this realization is that there’s no alternative. Many actively managed funds hold exactly the same assets, pot kettle black active funds. [00:06:52] In the index concentration argument from Morningstar, this is a quote indexing critics claim. Among other things, the index funds the tail wagging the dog. The way they tell it. Investors pour money into index funds. The funds shovel those dollars in their top holdings, and the portfolio gets evermore concentrated. [00:07:11] This they say makes index funds a kind of perpetual motion machine distorting the value of its stock holdings. Of course, then active funds doing exactly. Same thing. I know this is not something that the average person worries about, but this is something the average stacker worries about the average forwarder, the average best interest or the average earned investor worries about like, this is stuff our audience worries about, which got me thinking this is kinda like the boogeyman, isn’t it? [00:07:36] We’ll talk about why I think that this isn’t the huge deal. A lot of people think that it is, but what are some of these other deals, these things that we over worry about, these things hiding going, maybe bump in the night. We’re going to go into all those in just a moment, but first we have some sponsors that make sure this show’s free so that you don’t have to pay for it all. [00:07:56] This goodness that’s about to come with Paula, Jesse and Jordan. But before that, let’s hear from them and then we’re gonna talk about what fears do our money nerd friends have, and how do we fight those? [00:08:17] All right, let’s start this off with the actual topic here of index fund concentration. Paula does this idea that, uh, you know, these top 10 holdings of the magnificent seven, as we call them now mm-hmm. That these dominate the index fund and we’re kind of gonna go the way seven companies go. [00:08:32] Paula: It is true. I mean, the premise of the question is definitely true. [00:08:35] Uh, the Magnificent seven represent a major portion of a total stock market index or an s and p 500 index. But what people often miss is that throughout history, a handful of companies have dominated the overall market. So back in the day, it was railroad stocks, right? It was oil and gas stocks in the days of Standard Oil, and John d Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, like this was an issue then too. [00:09:01] And so the entire idea behind buying a major index fund is to make sure that. By virtue of not picking and choosing, you do have exposure to those seven prior to when they become so big so that you can be part of that growth. Jesse, same question. Do you worry about this? [00:09:18] Jesse: I’ve written about it before and certainly like thought about it a lot and there’s that whole idea, right, of the tail wagging the dog. [00:09:25] I mean, something that maybe stackers are aware of is back when index funds were initially thought of at that time, any sort of mutual fund out there was actively managed and you can, so because it was just everything out there was, was this way. You could think of it as this giant ocean liner of actively managed funds kind of cruising through the ocean, determining the prices of stocks. [00:09:47] Everybody out there be through their trading activity was determining the prices of stocks. And then you have this little index fund, this little dingy that all it’s doing is kind of tying a rope behind the ocean liner and saying whatever you say, the prices are fine, those are the prices, we’re just gonna follow your lead and buy in at those prices. [00:10:05] If that’s the metaphor you choose to think about it as well. It’s not a giant active cruise liner and a really small index dingy. Now, actually, the index dingy is considerably bigger than the cruise liner. So does the metaphor kind of break apart? It’s interesting, if you think about it through that lens, there’s are some concerns. [00:10:22] I saw Nick Majuli just wrote this week about the index fund bubble. Uh, a lot of ink has been spilled on the topic. I think it’s a really cool topic. I’m not personally too concerned, simply because prices are determined by trading volume, not necessarily by, is it held passively or held actively, but we’ll see what the future holds. [00:10:39] I mean, what if the whole stock market ends up being indexed? How, how will that work? [00:10:43] Joe: Yeah, I mean, uh, Jordan, what ends up happening then is we’re all buying these same, let’s say it’s 97, let’s say it’s these 500 companies. What happens to a company when they drop outta the s and p 500? I mean, holy cow, the amount your stock will drop just because of the index ification of the world could be gloom and doom for companies that are right on the fringe. [00:11:03] How do you fight this concentration? I mean, if you know what’s happening and you know that my index might be almost half 7, 8, 10 companies, how do you fight it? I [00:11:14] Jordan: mean, there are a few ways to do it. One is you can accept that there is a little over concentration. And if you look at the s and p 500 over right, decades and decades and decades, it’s always been somewhat over concentrated. [00:11:25] Yet the returns have continuously been good. So you can accept the fact that it is self cleansing, that it will change based on what’s happening and that you’ll never go down to zero. So one is acceptance. The other thing is to realize that even equities are just one of many asset allocations, right? So you can have equities, you can have your bond allocation, you can have your cash allocation. [00:11:44] Some people really like to do real estate, whether that’s REITs or whether they own real estate. Some people are into things like crypto and gold. I personally am not, but it’s another way also to diversify. Um, so I think there’s some other things you can do. There is obviously a group of people who believe in adding some of the things that are missing from the s and p 500, right? [00:12:03] So can we add some small cap value? So that’s a way in which you can add some other indexes. Could you add. Basically a variety of different indexes to cover what the s and p doesn’t, and that certainly is a way you could go if you’re interested. [00:12:17] Joe: Yeah, it was, my first thought Paula was, was why would we just have one index? [00:12:21] You know? I mean, you don’t even have to get fancy with Bitcoin and real estate. You could just have three or four indexes. [00:12:27] Paula: Yeah. I mean, a, a small cap allocation is a great way to kind of offset a little bit of the risk. The, the key is, you know, and you could spend eternity debating this question is what percentage of your portfolio should you put in a total market index and what percentage should you put in a small cap allocation? [00:12:45] But having some kind of a small cap allocation in there that can solve a lot of this concern if you do have this concern. [00:12:51] Joe: There’s something else that DG said, Jesse, that. I think a lot of people don’t know about or, or don’t think enough about, and he called it self cleansing, right? That the index is self cleansing. [00:13:02] And I think this is a big thing. Do you mind explaining how the index is self cleansing to our stackers out there? Because for me, this gives me a lot of comfort that I don’t have to pay attention to the fact that this is only seven stocks. [00:13:15] Jesse: Well, yeah, I think what Doc Tee’s referring to there, and maybe as an example, we can use an s and p 500 index fund, which is to say that when you have an underperforming company inside the s and p 500 and maybe as an s and p 500 index fund owner, maybe it doesn’t appeal to you that you own this underperforming company inside of the index. [00:13:35] Well, eventually, if the company continues to underperform, that company’s gonna drop out of the s and p 500 drop out of the index, and it will be replaced by another company that ostensibly is, is doing much better. And so that over time, I. You know, all you have to do is look at the constituent companies of the s and p 500 over the last 50 years, and what you’ll realize is that the companies that haven’t performed well have eventually dropped out of the index. [00:13:57] And the companies that started small and are doing really, really well eventually joined the index and as the owner of the index. You own all the right companies, maybe not all the time, but enough of the time so that your returns have ended up being pretty, pretty good. [00:14:11] Joe: And I, and I think Paula, this was even part of your original point that people that are new to this might not realize that if it, during, you know, you went back to John d Rockefeller for goodness sakes. [00:14:21] Yeah. But if it was Standard Oil back in the day, then it was General Electric and at and t and you know, is you didn’t have to trade anything. The, the [00:14:30] Paula: index just kept up. Exactly. So naturally that’s sort of the point of the index is naturally over time as the winners start to, to weaken in their position. [00:14:40] I mean, general Electric is a great example. It’s, it still exists, it’s still a, it’s not the Dutch East India company like it, it still is in business, but it just occupies a smaller position of the overall index. And so naturally over time as these things happen, the index automatically adjusts. [00:14:58] Joe: There’s a fear that a lot of our. [00:15:01] Money nerd fans have that I’ve seen on the internet that I’d like to also address. And that’s the fear that if I buy an index fund, that these people managing the index fund on Wall Street are idiots and we can beat the idiots. That’s not the reason why. And, and this is, I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on this, but this is not the reason why these people lose. [00:15:22] If you’ve ever met people on Wall Street, they don’t get Wall Street jobs because they’re morons. The way they’re paid though has a lot to do with why they lose, and the amount of money they’re managing millions and sometimes billions of dollars. And their ability to get in and out of a position quickly is zero. [00:15:37] Second, because of this thing called a prospectus, which is meant to protect you, if Paula runs a fund company as an example, she is told that she has to buy this one asset class and that’s it. And then her performance is based on how she does relative to the s and p 500. So through defensive mechanisms, AKA, I wanna keep my job. [00:15:59] They try to stay as close as they can to the s and p making very few bets. So, uh, uh, I hear often this fear that, that, oh, anybody can beat the idiots and it’s been proven well. It’s not ’cause they’re morons. It’s, it’s because of how they’re paid. Paula, what’s your cat doing back there? [00:16:14] Paula: My cat is about to attack my turtle. [00:16:16] So that’s my turtle tank. That’s the cat sniffing the turtle tag. Every [00:16:20] Joe: money nerd watching this video on YouTube with us is, uh, worried about that. [00:16:25] Paula: Now the cat has lost interest in the turtle and is simply, oh, and now she’s showing us her butt. [00:16:31] Joe: There it is. That’s about right. Well better the cat than Doug. [00:16:34] So we’re, we’re good to go there. Doc, what’s another thing you find people in your earn and invest community really worry about that the average person doesn’t worry about? [00:16:44] Jordan: So what I hear, and I’m not sure this is something that the average person doesn’t worry about, but what I hear over and over again is they get, they come into money somehow, right? [00:16:52] They get a bonus, maybe they get an inheritance, something good happens and they have a bunch of money, and it’s the fear that they’re gonna put the money in the market and the market’s gonna drop the next day. So they might buy into indexes, they might be like, okay, I’m ready. I like this idea of having money in equities, but I’m still gonna kinda wait because things are running a little rich, right? [00:17:11] That’s what they say. It’s running a little rich. Let’s wait till the prices go down a little so that I can put my money in. And as we all know, no one can predict what’s gonna happen tomorrow or the next day, and therefore you’re just basically keeping your money outta the market. And the longer you keep your money outta the market, the more likely in the long term you’re gonna lose. [00:17:29] So I see that one quite a bit as I’m just, I agree with this idea. I even know that I wanna put my money in s and p 500 index, but things are running so high today. I better hold off. [00:17:38] Joe: We even see a Jesse with like 401k rollovers, right? Well, I don’t know if this is a good time to roll over my 401k to an IRA because the market’s high right now, and who knows? [00:17:47] Are the market’s sinking or the market’s going up, or the market? You know, all these, all these reasons [00:17:52] Jesse: a hundred percent. To back up what both you guys just said, a very, uh, I think it was episode, a recent episode. I won’t plug myself, but I had entire episode of my podcast inspired by a, a woman, a listener who reached out in August saying, Hey, this is August of 2024. [00:18:07] Hey, is now the right time to invest? And I listed out all the things that Doc G just said about like, Hey, we can’t be sure if now’s the right time to invest or not. She didn’t heed the advice. And then in December, she reached back out and said, oh, I guess you were right. Well, on that front, I’ll, I’ll say to listeners, there’s a great quote to keep in mind, which is that, uh, market returns are written in pencil, not pen. [00:18:29] So my advice to her is write so far, for all we know, the market might drop 20% in a month and then she can invest, and it would’ve been the smart thing to do. But to go back to what Jordan said, all else being equal, the odds are she should have invested as soon as possible. History bears that out over and over again. [00:18:47] We can look at little things like the, the PE ratio, the CAPE ratio, the cyclically adjusted pe and, and maybe we can try to make some arguments that when the CAPE ratio is high, when prices of stocks are high relative to their earnings, future returns tend to be a little bit lower. There’s some truth there, but it still doesn’t mean that just because you have a high PE ratio that you should avoid investing today is definitely a, a common thread that I think we all see in, in a lot of the DIY investor community. [00:19:14] Joe: What’s your best strategy then? It sounds like it’s just invest it, invest it now, get in. [00:19:20] Jesse: Well, it it is or, or at the very least, something that I think is a really good middle ground is to say, okay, let’s put together a plan that over the next 12 months you are going to get this money in the market. My vote, Mr. [00:19:32] Person I’m talking to, would be to put it all in today. And I think because of that, why don’t you put a large chunk of it, put a third of it in today, put half of it in today, and then the remainder, let’s put in an equal amount every month over the next 12 months. Something like that. You know, it’s not going to be ideal, right? [00:19:50] You know, in retrospect, you’re gonna look backward and the ideal scenario will have revealed itself. You don’t know when the ideal time to commit is. And so if you wanna hedge your bets, fine, put it in a little bit now, spread the rest over the remaining 12 months, but either way, you can dollar cost average that way, and at least your money will get in the market. [00:20:10] Eventually, [00:20:10] Joe: Paul, anything you’d add to that or say differently to somebody who has that fear? [00:20:14] Paula: I would say time in the market, just to kind of piggyback off of it, but say it in a different way. Time in the market is more important than time in the market. And as you know, Jesse mentioned, uh, Nick Majuli earlier. [00:20:27] His book is titled, just Keep Buying. I. So I think if you kind of hold both of those ideas in your head, time in the market is more important than timing, and your job is to just keep buying. Like, that’s all you do, just shovel money in and don’t even pay attention to any of the, uh, the rest of it. If you do that consistently over time, you’ll be good with, with a good asset allocation, you’ll be good. [00:20:48] Joe: I would add on my end too, if it’s a, because, uh, uh, uh, doc, you gave us the example of, uh, somebody that has inheritance, right? So this is new money to you if it’s new money to you. I like Jesse, I like your idea of the dollar cost averaging in because we don’t know, and even though the market goes up roughly 70% of the time over long periods of time, we don’t know that that’s gonna be tomorrow. [00:21:11] So if you’re worried about it, then let’s go ahead and go a little slower. The one that frustrates me is when somebody’s doing the 401k rollover thing, ’cause that money was already invested. So when they’re like, okay, if I move it out, do I move it all back in right away? Well, yes, it was already invested. [00:21:28] It was just invested worse than the way you’re going to invest. So you’re really on the same swing. You know when you were a kid and you were on the swings, I don’t know about you, but when I was on the swings, I always tried to swing higher than everybody else. Right? See if you could go all the way around. [00:21:41] So if we got one swing that’s gonna go higher, why wouldn’t I do that now? Like move to the better swing. If I think the IRA is a better swing than the swing, that’s not as good in my 401k. I need to just stay on the swing. I dunno if that analogy even makes sense. Should I talk more about swinging? Just, just keep swinging, Joe. [00:21:59] Just keep swinging. Yeah. When I was, tell me [00:22:01] Jesse: another engineering joke. [00:22:04] Joe: When I was a kid, people thought I was such a swinger. It was so, so incredible. Doc, how do you answer this? You [00:22:12] Jordan: brought up the question. So I’m a big fan of investing right away. I mean, dollar cost averaging is fun, but you might end up dollar cost averaging and then the market might drop 50% the next day, on the last day of your dollar cost averaging. [00:22:24] So I, I think you could slice it anyway. I, I do love Jesse’s idea. If you’re anxious, dollar cost average. If you want somewhere in between, put 50% in and dollar cost average the rest. But as long as you’re getting it in the market, you’re winning. It’s the people who keep holding and waiting and then never put it in that are the ones who end up losing long term. [00:22:43] Joe: Yeah. ’cause you’re betting against the market and this is where just showing somebody that ibbotson chart, right? The chart of the market over long periods of time. If you don’t know what an ibbotson chart is, we’ll have one in our show notes page at Stacking Benjamins. But regardless of the Cape ratio or whatever, you know, Jesse, when you, you’re talking about it’s now the time and timing the market, all you gotta do is take a look at an Ibbotson chart and go, would I rather play that game? [00:23:05] Or rather know that 30 years from now when I want this money, it’s gonna be a lot higher? ’cause that’s what Ibbotson chart shows you immediately, historically, through, you know, through all long periods of time. Paula, give us one more before we break for our amazing trivia competition. Kickoff one, one more fear, like I’m more worried. [00:23:22] Yeah. Fear. What’s a fear that our communities have? [00:23:25] Paula: I, I think a lot of people worry about black swan events, you know, those low probability, high magnitude events and rightfully so because they are very high magnitude if they were to come to fruition. There can be sometimes people who over worry about black swan events, meaning they overestimate the probability of those. [00:23:44] Joe: Ah, so is that how you mitigate that is by telling the audience that the probability’s not high, but we do know it is gonna happen again. It will happen at some point. [00:23:53] Paula: Well, yeah, I, so, and I’m not just talking about market-based black swan events, I’m talking about any type of life Black Swan event, right? [00:24:00] Like, um, I thinking, oh, like fires where I live. Exactly, which unfortunately many, many people are dealing with right now. Natural disasters. Uh, it could be getting run over by a truck, you know, it could be, uh oh. Doc has something to say about that. [00:24:18] Jordan: No, not not running over a truck, but go ahead and finish your thought and I’ll jump in. [00:24:21] Paula: I was like, he’s got a story there. But you know, any type of Black Swan event like that, whether it’s something in, in your health or something in your community, or something in the markets, I think people rightfully should protect themselves from the risk of ruin, but sometimes can be so worried about these that they overfocus on the threat. [00:24:43] Jordan: Yeah, I just wanted to add in it’s, you know, it’s interesting ’cause we worry so much about the Black Swan events and then we don’t pay attention to what I call white swan events, which are devastating but highly, often probable and likely events. So like getting a divorce is a white swan event that people don’t wanna do the prenup, they don’t wanna do the postnup. [00:25:01] And yet, unlike a Black Swan event, lots and lots of people get divorced. So I, I love talking about the Black Swan events because I think it also shows how we actually don’t mitigate against the obvious stuff. Good disability insurance, a really strong emergency fund, thinking about divorce, I mean all the things. [00:25:17] Mm-hmm Thinking about, you know, a health crisis, like all these things that most likely will happen to either us or a loved one. Uh, we tend to be horrible at planning for those. [00:25:26] Joe: Well, which is interesting, Jesse, because you work in a financial planning office. I mean, one of my favorite things to do when I was a financial planner. [00:25:32] These what if scenarios, right? Because I just love to doc’s point, I love this idea of what if something bad happens and we just start listing all these things and come up with these strategies. It’s so, it’s actually in a little bit morbid way, kind of fun to do. [00:25:47] Jesse: I never could have guessed that I would drop my phone into the bathtub last night. [00:25:54] Never saw it coming. Never in a million years total black swan outta nowhere. Uh, at first I thought a meteor might have come down into the tub that I could plan for, but the fact that it was my phone falling outta my sweatpants pocket never saw it coming. No, uh, both, both really good points and yeah. Uh, to your question, Joe, it is, it’s, it’s really fun. [00:26:15] Sometimes I, I worry that people view it as like, um, they’ll view you as a pessimist. Like you’re just be, you’re a Debbie downer, you’re a gray sky, Rochester non-color wearing pessimist, [00:26:28] Joe: non-line green wearing, [00:26:30] Jesse: right? Yeah. It’s a true, funny story. One of my older brothers was doing, so I forget exactly what he’s doing, and my dad was kind of going through the whole, like, have you thought about this? [00:26:39] Have you thought about that? Have you thought about this? And my brother called him out on it and was like, dad, all you ever do is think about the worst cases. So my dad paused and kind of tilted his hand and looked at him and just goes, okay. How about this for a productive question? What if everything works out and it’s just the best thing possible, almost like, like, of course. [00:26:57] Well, we don’t need to apply any critical thought to that answer. What a wonderful world, the critical thought has to be applied to these negative what if questions? And Yeah. Going back to your question, Joe, I usually try to couch it in like, Hey, this is a hard part of the job. It’s not always easy conversations, but have you thought about estate planning? [00:27:14] What if, you know, have you thought about your parents dying? What’s gonna happen in that situation? Have you thought about, and I try to empathize with people, but it’s certainly important, isn’t it? [00:27:22] Joe: It is so important. And, uh, we have one of our favorite episodes, uh, most watched episodes and listened to episodes every year. [00:27:30] Is when we talk about fire safety, which Doug is so, it’s so wild to me that a fire safety episode where we do the fire drill and I’ve had so many, so many parents reach out to me going, we did that with our family afterwards. People aren’t even parents going, I love the idea. ’cause I remember doing that when I was in school. [00:27:47] Why don’t do a fire drill now? And OG calls that in his financial planning practice. He calls it a fire drill. Paula. [00:27:53] Paula: Oh, I was gonna say, I, I had a, I have a couple of friends who are firefighters for the Austin Fire Department. They came to visit and one of my friends was like, just casually, he was like, all right, where’s your nearest emergency exit? [00:28:04] And I’m like, I don’t know. And and he was, he’s like, wrong [00:28:08] Joe: answer. [00:28:09] Paula: Yeah. And he was, he was like, you don’t know. Shocked. He was like, well, ’cause I live on the 20th floor of my apartment building. Yeah. He was like, well, if something happens, how do you, what’s the nearest stairwell? And I’m like. I don’t know. [00:28:27] Never thought about it. Wow. [00:28:28] Doug: Paula, one question. Um, yeah. Did you become friends with this firefighter before or after you bought the calendar? [00:28:35] Paula: Ha. [00:28:38] Doug: Inquiring minds. What? Another No comment. [00:28:41] Paula: Came with the calendar. [00:28:42] Joe: Oh, nice. Bought the deluxe package. But immediately, Paul, I’m sure you went and found out where that stairwell was. [00:28:49] Paula: I did. Yeah. Yeah. Now I know. [00:28:51] Joe: Yeah. I absolutely love that. This idea of, of what if it happens? I. Because Jesse, to your dad’s point, it is so much better. I love planning for the worst, and then every time the best happens, I’m grateful. It’s a super place to be. [00:29:04] bit: Mm-hmm. [00:29:05] Joe: We’re gonna hear Jesse’s amazing addition to this conversation and another fear that people have after our break. [00:29:13] If you’re brand new to the Stacking Benjamins community on these quote normal episodes, we have a year long trivia competition, which we are starting today. And I wanna start it today because our returning champion isn’t here. And we might be able to get off with somebody else leading the way, but. I don’t know because defending his honor today, doc G from our Brother Podcast, earn Invest is playing for og. [00:29:38] Uh, he’s no longer playing for mom. We’re gonna just make it official. Jesse, no matter what you say, a frequent contributor, Jesse Kramer’s playing no longer for Mom. She’s got no interest in this. He’s playing on Team Jesse now. So we’ll call it Jesse and Friends. Time to start trying. And then Paula pant the Afford Anything community who I know through the emails, a lot of the afford anything community behind Paula app pant and hoping well just, you know, hoping, I’m not sure what they’re hoping for Paula, [00:30:02] Paula: but they’re just 20, [00:30:04] Joe: 25. [00:30:04] Could be the year. It, it very well might be. So we, uh, run this all year long and the winner gets a dollar store trophy with an erasable front, which OG just popped up behind him on a recent episode. He used permanent sharpie marker [00:30:19] Doug: on the [00:30:20] Joe: erasable, [00:30:22] Doug: maybe an embossing tool [00:30:24] Joe: that, that beautiful dollar store trophy. [00:30:27] But for every answer we have to have a question and Doug furnishes those each week. So Doug, what’s on tap to kick off the 2025 season? [00:30:37] Doug: Well buckle up stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and welcome to the first actual round table trivia question of 2025. Do you smell that? You smell Yes. The air is filled with possibility and optimism and frankly, some unresolved questions like, can Paul App pant finally capture at least second place in this competition? [00:31:00] Or can do g miss our trivia answer by maybe less than a million? And of course we’re all, we’re all wondering when Jesse Kramer will update his tech skills so he can low key cheat again and nail two questions in a row on the.like he may or may not have done back in 2024. Look, I I’m not, I’m not accusing you, Jesse, I’m just wondering out loud in a disapproving tone of voice if it could happen. [00:31:24] Jesse Gates a real thing in Stacking Benjamin’s country. So let’s begin these games by talking about a big audacious 2025 goal we have here on the show. We’re gonna help some stacker out there. Become the next billionaire. It’s a worthy goal, right? So here’s today’s question. After we plus won this invite to the Billionaire Club, how many billionaires will there be in the world? [00:31:50] I’ll be back with the answer right after I find out if a really successful lingerie store owner would be called a Brazilian, there’s a term I probably just coined and should pat TM on that everybody tm. Well, Doug, uh, either that [00:32:05] Joe: or somebody from Brazil maybe could be that too, either way. But which one would you rather think about? [00:32:10] Could be either somebody from Brazil I would rather talk about. So, uh, let’s kick this off. We go in reverse order of last year’s standings, which means that, uh, doc G is gonna go first. Jesse will go second. Paula gets to go Third number of billionaires plus our new billionaire. So number of billionaires right now, plus one more equals What number is that? [00:32:35] Me? Am I up? [00:32:36] Jordan: You are up. Put me in coach. All right. So I think in the US we’re in the hundreds, right? Four or 500, I thought something like that. And so now you’re asking the world. I’m gonna say 3,542. [00:32:55] Joe: 3,542. Very specific to [00:32:58] Jordan: kick [00:32:58] Joe: off the year. Yeah, I just, I wanted [00:33:00] Jordan: something [00:33:00] Joe: specific. [00:33:01] Jordan: No reason. [00:33:02] Joe: Yes, Jesse. I love, I love Jesse Gate, by the way. [00:33:05] Very, very big. Like, uh, people in New England and, and, uh, what, what, what was that called? Football Gate or Flat Gate or Infl Gate. Infl Gate. Gate Inflate. Gate Deflategate, [00:33:17] Doug: yeah. [00:33:17] Joe: Yes. As part of Bill’s Nation. Jesse, I’m sure you know Inflate Gate. [00:33:21] Jesse: Oh yeah. Huge. Tom Brady fans here. Uh, well actually there’s an episode last year where I believe I quoted the number of US billionaires and Doc GI think you were pretty darn close to on the money. [00:33:35] If I expanded out to the globe though, I’m gonna go a little lower than Doc and I’m gonna say, uh, 1070 1, 1 0 7 1 is my guess. Neighbor Doug book it. [00:33:52] Joe: He said, look at Dano, that that’s what it says right here on Google is 1071 fired. Alright, Paula, you got one? Paula, you’ve got 1071. Jordan has 35, 42. [00:34:09] Paula: Well, when I heard the question, my first thought was a thousand billionaires only because I kind of like the contrasting orders of magnitude. And so for the case of capturing the under, I will go 1 0 7 0. [00:34:24] What could go wrong? 1070. [00:34:28] Joe: Alright, we’ve got 3,542 from uh, Jordan. Jesse, next up with 1071 Paula takes him out of the knees with 1070. Is it Paula pants? Ear? Is Jesse on the nose? Is Doc G within a million? Yes. We’re gonna find out in just a second. Yes I am. Jordan, you opened this up with a guess of 3,542. [00:34:54] Both Jesse and Paula said nay. Nay. They think it’s fewer. What do you say? [00:34:58] Jordan: I say that I’m gonna be closer than usual, so I call that a win no matter what. [00:35:03] Joe: Do you want us do the speech right now? Just get it out outta the way. [00:35:06] Jordan: Pretty, pretty much. I’ve won already, regardless of who really wins. So we’re we’re good here. [00:35:11] Joe: It’s impossible you’d be off by a million. It it would be fun though if it was 1,000,300, 3000, 3,540. Yes. 43. That would, that would be really ironic. Yes. And then, uh, Jesse, 1071 sounded like a nice guess until uh, Paula got there. [00:35:28] Jesse: Yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay. I didn’t wanna divulge too much of my clandestine information before I, for some reason, the number of like 460 is sticking out to me for US based billionaires. [00:35:39] And I gotta think there’s more US based billionaires than other countries, but like all other countries combined, no, probably not. So, I don’t know, just. A thousand, you know, 1,071. I don’t know. Hoping it’s a little bit higher than that. [00:35:50] Joe: Just, just the voice in your head, Jesse. I love this self-talk like back and forth. [00:35:56] It is an amazing thing to watch Paula thousand 70. [00:36:01] Paula: You know, uh, if it’s true that there’s maybe somewhere around 400, 500 US based billionaires, I would have to believe that the US would have approximately. Half of the world’s billionaires. So yeah, I’m, I’m feeling good about being close to the 1000 mark. [00:36:19] Well, [00:36:19] Joe: you know, who knows? I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. Doug knows. Of course. Doug knows Doug who’s taking home the first win of 2025. [00:36:30] Doug: Hey, there, stackers. I’m billionaire maker and Brazilian air believer. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You know, Jesse Kramer politely cautioned me during the break not to talk too much about Jesse Gate 24. He said, if I didn’t shut up about it, he’d tell everyone that I was the guy behind the Doug Coin debacle. [00:36:49] I tried to tell him it had nothing to do with that except lending my perfectly proportioned face to the coin he seemed to understand. But then again, he never really put the baseball bat down. So tensions are still a bit escalated here in the basement. Well, Jesse. Surprised you didn’t totally nail today’s trivia question, which was how many billionaires are in the world after we plus won that number? [00:37:13] Well, I’ll tell you this. The number is 1,712 more than Paula guessed, 1,711 more than you guessed, and just 760 less than Doc G. Oh my God. No. Oh my God, no. ’cause the correct answer is 2,781 plus one. Yeah, baby stacker. And [00:37:35] Jordan: this absolutely sucks because this is horrible. OG ends up ahead. Anyway, this puts this one this [00:37:42] Doug: by one. [00:37:44] It is a total catastrophe. We tried to [00:37:46] Joe: plan this out to have Doc g play for og, so it wouldn’t happen. What a nightmare. This is my year baby. This is my year. And it bites us in the ass. The guy goes to the Caymans and we can’t, we still can’t. [00:38:02] Doug: Oh man. So 2,781 billionaires in the world. And by the end of 25 we’ll have one more ’cause we’re gonna get a stacker there. [00:38:10] But that’s your answer. [00:38:11] Jordan: I, I volunteer to be the one [00:38:12] Doug: you get there. [00:38:13] Jordan: It probably will be you. I mean, all those book sales, new book, all those, all those book sales, it’s definitely, it’s gonna make it at least a million. Yeah. Do you know, or I’m sorry, A billion. Yeah. You know how many [00:38:23] Joe: billionaires there are out there writing books? [00:38:26] Yes. So many. So many. A couple more than there are podcasters. Uh, alright, let’s, uh, dive into the second half of this shindig as mom says. Jesse, what’s another thing that we worry about is Uber nerds That maybe we can help people, uh, PE people calm down about a little bit. [00:38:42] Jesse: Question for you? Does it have to be an Uber nerd concern or can it just be a concern that I see out there? [00:38:47] Okay. Okay. Well, I [00:38:47] Joe: like the one that Doc said. Yeah, the one that Doc said is, Uber nerds share that. But you know, my mom, uh, recently asked that. She’s like, what if I take this money and put it in the market? It goes down right away. [00:38:58] Jesse: Yeah. I think another one that might carve out some new territory here for us today is just the fear of scams and frauds in general, or just this idea. [00:39:06] I, I hear this a lot where it’s like, you know what? The stock market is rigged. The stock market’s a scam. Other people are pulling the strings. They’re just, you know, they’re waiting for a whole bunch of suckers like me to put my money in, and then they’re gonna pull the rug out from under me and, and take everything away. [00:39:21] Granted, there obviously are, there have been investments in the past, unregulated investments, Ponzi schemes, things like that. Truly fraudulent schemes that people have heard about or are aware of. Bernie Madoff certainly did no favors for us, did he? But. I think many people out there, they confuse the volatile nature of the stock market or just the volatile nature of investments in general, which is a feature, not a bug. [00:39:45] And instead they come to the conclusion that the market itself must be a rigged game. [00:39:50] Joe: Well, let’s dive into that. I mean, Jordan, two points movies like the Wolf of Wall Street don’t, uh, don’t call ’em anybody’s fears, right? The whole Jordan Belfort thing. And then, you know, when you look at the whole Reddit thing around GameStop, right? [00:40:06] And all of the people going, look at what they did. There’s more shares that are being like, how, how are they engineering this? So the big guys still win while the rest of us lose. Like there’s a lot of people thinking exactly what Jesse’s talking about. [00:40:19] Jordan: So my take on this, and this is a, a big reason why I think people also like index funds, is what we’re really talking about here, I think is efficiency, right? [00:40:28] So the idea of efficiency is. Is what’s happening in the market? Are the changes we’re seeing accurate of what’s really happening? Or are they a momentary glitch? Are we seeing low prices because for instance, the stocks are valued low? Or are we seeing low prices? ’cause it’s a glitch, it’s inefficient, and there’s knowledge out there that we don’t have. [00:40:49] And eventually we could get that knowledge and realize that that’s a low price and we should get in or get out depending on that issue. The bigger the market, the more efficient it is, the more likely that the general knowledge out there is the correct knowledge. So it is true when you’re talking about investing in something, which very few people invest in. [00:41:10] There’s a lot more room for inefficiency. Maybe you just don’t have all the knowledge. Maybe you don’t know what’s going on. But when we’re talking about these bigger markets like index funds and even equities in general, it’s such a big market. It tends to be efficient. In other words, the market tends to long-term move in the direction that it should. [00:41:29] That’s reflective of the values of the companies that are being represented. And so I guess I would tell someone who’s worried that there’s a hoax going on is the less investors you have in something, the more likelihood there could be a hoax going on. Whereas these really big markets tend to be really efficient, meaning that the price long-term actually matches the value. [00:41:51] Does that make sense? It does. [00:41:53] Joe: It does make sense. Paula, did you worry about the GameStop thing and all the Reddit talk, that there was something nefarious going on under the hood? They’re involving Robinhood and, uh, some of these big hedge funds. Well, [00:42:05] Paula: there was that controversy, I, and I’m forgetting the details right now, but there was some controversy around Robinhood would allow you to buy, but it wouldn’t allow you to sell. [00:42:13] Yeah. Or something to that effect. So I remember, and also [00:42:15] Joe: the short float being bigger than it should be. [00:42:18] Paula: Right, right. But that was, so it, I mean, that particular event was so in the headlines and so closely monitored. I remember it was the one time that the A OC and Ted Cruz actually agreed on something which was both were like, Hey, we need to look into Robinhood. [00:42:34] That particular event was so closely monitored by not just the general public, but by elected leaders and by regulators. And there were so many layers of protection there that I wasn’t, you know, I was a little fired up on social media about it, but I wasn’t actually like worried in any deep way. I think where we have greater risk is in markets that have less regulations such as cryptocurrency. [00:43:00] Joe: Jesse, do you worry about something systemic that there’s a bigger risk than just this maybe one time thing or just Robinhood, that there’s, you know, the people on Wall Street playing by different rules than you and I Well, let’s, let’s go to the next level. How about this? How about the people in Congress who have these phenomenal returns in their portfolios? [00:43:19] Jesse: Yeah. So that goes back and Doc G used the word efficiency and, and my personal definition or understanding might, might just be, this might just be a semantic difference from what Doc G was saying, but is the market’s price reflective of all publicly available information, or is there some sort of hidden information reflected in the price? [00:43:37] Because, and what that really means is, do some investors know more than me, do they know secrets about a company that the company hasn’t published yet? Does that mean that I’m just, I’m not playing with a full deck, and of course I’m not gonna buy the stock at the correct price or at the, at the truly reflective price. [00:43:52] That’s how I think of efficiency. It’s, it’s a function of the information that’s out there and whether it’s publicly or privately available. And what you’re referring to there, Joe, is if I’m in Congress or if I’m a senator and I just sat through a top secret meeting that I have security clearance for, or just a meeting that I’m privileged to and other people aren’t, and I know that some contract is going to company X, Y, Z, or I know that some tax law is gonna start affecting company A, B, C. [00:44:18] Well, if I go out and I trade on that information, that sure seems like, you know, if that person was working, if that senator was working inside the corporation, that would be called insider trading and that is a felony. We have laws against that. But if they’re not working for the corporation, but they happen to be sitting in the right meeting on Capitol Hill and they trade on that information, it doesn’t seem fair. [00:44:42] Yeah, it certainly riles me up if you can’t tell. [00:44:45] Joe: Well, and I think the big question here is that, you know, a lot of people say that, yeah, okay. That part of the system’s rigged truly doesn’t affect you. I mean, truly doesn’t affect, right, a hundred percent. It doesn’t affect my ability to keep up with them, but it doesn’t affect my ability to participate in the market. [00:44:59] That’s [00:44:59] Jesse: true. I mean, it doesn’t make it right. Not at all. At the same, right, at the same time, like it is not justified. And you’re right. Like does, does it prevent me from investing or do I let that information affect the way I invest? No, I don’t. No, I don’t. But it’s certainly a problem. [00:45:14] Joe: Jesse, you were talking about insider trading. [00:45:15] If somebody worked at the company, insider trading is a real thing, and it isn’t always illegal, like insiders are allowed to trade and they have to publish their trades. Have you ever, Paula made a trade because you saw some insiders making that trade? [00:45:30] Paula: No. In fact, I’ve, I’ve never looked at information that insiders have published. [00:45:35] Um, where do you get that? Do you just Google like what you can, you can [00:45:38] Joe: go to cnbc.com, Yahoo Finance, wherever, look at the board of directors, and they are required to publish whether they’ve been buying or whether they’ve been selling. And by the way, what’s interesting to look at with that is if they’re, if they’re buying or selling, my goodness, you have a whiner in the background there, Paula. [00:45:56] We’ve, we’ve got, uh, if they’re doing it the same number of shares, the same amount of money, maybe once a quarter. I know that’s a financial plan in action, right? Yeah. But if they’re doing it irregularly, it becomes much more interesting because then. I believe there might be something that they know that was actually the entire reason. [00:46:15] People have been fans of the show for a while. The only reason I bought Lumens stock was because the new CEO that came in bought a crap load of Lumens stock, and then it turned into the worst company ever. Then it turned out I was brilliant, and now it turns out I’m somewhere in the middle, and if I don’t sell soon, I will be dumb again because it just has continued to go down. [00:46:34] But um, as I’ve also said, I didn’t put much money. I think I put, you know, 500 bucks in it. So it wasn’t gonna be the end of the world for Joe. If Lumen goes under [00:46:44] Jordan: Doc, doesn’t some of this argument. Fail to recognize the fact that market beta is kind of free, right? Average market returns are free to anyone who wants them. [00:46:53] It’s true if you want alpha, right? If you want right above market returns, A, you could rig the system, right? With things like insider trading or B, you could be incredibly lucky. Or I guess c we could say maybe there are a small number of people with a huge amount of skill that will get them alpha. But regardless of all that to say, the whole system is rigged, ignores the fact that beta is free, right? [00:47:14] You get the s and p 500 index, or you get a total market index and that’s it. It’s free. And I do, I do, [00:47:20] Joe: Jesse, I like that position of, you know what some, I feel like a lot of us ask our portfolio to add alpha to our life, and we don’t ask that of our career, of our life, of our, of other areas. [00:47:32] Jesse: Yeah. I, I, I think your energy is better spent seeking out, if we’re using the alpha beta terms, it’s, it’s, your energy is better spent seeking out alpha in other. [00:47:40] Arenas a a hundred percent agree. Going back to what you were saying there, doc G, the whole idea of beta is free. It is. I do have this question. Or like thinking back to whether we’re talking about market efficiency or the index fund bubble or, or anything like that, or black swan events, I mean these are, there are these ideas of just because we have an efficient market and just because beta is free, that isn’t the same thing as saying that the price is correct. [00:48:06] It just means that the price is reflective of available information and Right. I mean, and that’s kind of getting back to Robert Schiller irrational exuberance or even Warren Buffet, who does say, no, the mar, of course the market’s not efficient. Look at what I’ve done and look at what a lot of other people have done. [00:48:21] It’s just that. For you and I to try to think that we have more information to be right more often than the market in general, that I agree with you a hundred percent and say, yeah, just take the market performance, take the beta and and move on to other aspects of your life. [00:48:36] Joe: But I even think traders Jesse, who do this all day long, because they know how dangerous it is when you think you have all the information, are experts. [00:48:45] The good ones that I’ve talked to are experts at going, you know, what, what’s the chance that I don’t have all the information? Uh, where, where the average person who’s a. Uh, a stacker, a best interest or, or an investor, a forwarder. Like all of our communities, I think are from the people that I’ve talked to, less likely. [00:49:04] When you feel this good feeling about something to go, there’s gotta be information. I don’t have, like the best traders do that. We, we, we talked to a guy named Jack Schwager who, uh, profiles these amazing investors who beat the market over and over and over and over. And I love Jack’s quote, which was, the market is not efficient. [00:49:24] To your point, Jesse, he goes, but for 99.9% of us, we should pretend it is. Yeah. [00:49:29] Jesse: Yes. It’s great. We, [00:49:31] Joe: we should think like it is. ’cause it’s a hell of a lot of work to go the other way. And you don’t want to, you know, the juice isn’t gonna be worth the squeeze when there’s so many other things that we, we might be able to do. [00:49:41] Paula, bring this home. Give us one more. How about that? [00:49:44] Paula: One more fear or worry? Actually can, yeah, [00:49:45] Joe: one more fear. Can [00:49:46] Paula: I, can I also just share my thought as you guys have been talking about the, the market is Yes. That quote about how in the. Short term, the market is a voting machine and in the long term it’s a weighing machine. [00:49:56] Joe: Oh, that’s great. [00:49:56] Paula: Yeah. Mm-hmm. I forget who it might have been Charlie Munger or somebody, but that was what was going through my mind as I was listening to, uh, it sounds [00:50:03] Joe: like Charlie Munger because it goes right along with that Warren Buffet quote about Mr. Market. Right, right. Mr. Market from day to day doesn’t know what he thinks. [00:50:10] One day he thinks it’s overvalued. Next day he think it’s undervalued. But over the long term, Mr. Market’s. [00:50:15] Jesse: Yeah. [00:50:16] Joe: Right on. Right. I think it’s Ben [00:50:17] Jesse: Graham. The intelligent investor is from that book. Both Mr. Market and that quote are Graham Iss. [00:50:23] Joe: Well, there you go. Paul and I got the leaves. Jesse goes to the root. [00:50:27] Nice. Right on the same family tree. Yeah. Paula, what’s one more fear, [00:50:32] Paula: I think overly obsessing about asset allocation, and actually to go back to the beginning of this conversation, particularly in the spirit of people now kind of distrusting, uh, an s and p 500 or a total stock market index, one of the outcomes that can come from that is. [00:50:49] Just getting so granular and so obsessive about asset allocation that it, it starts missing the forest for the trees and you know, and then all, and basically at that point you’re worrying about the wrong things. [00:51:02] Joe: Paula, we can’t bring that up right now because I’m trying to get people to worry about asset allocation a little bit. [00:51:09] If we can worry about it just a little bit. Like I’m speaking to that part of the audience that doesn’t think about it at all and thinks it’s bologna and you shouldn’t do anything about it. [00:51:17] Paula: Like, come on, maybe we come to the Goldilocks scenario, right? Like, this porridge is too hot, the porridge is too cold. [00:51:22] Oh, this porridge is just right. [00:51:24] Joe: But to your point, I mean, between the fire community who says, don’t think about it at all. Mm-hmm. Which drives me crazy. And then the people who, like I, I was, I was helping someone look at their portfolio today and they had like part of their money in a Japan fund and I was like, why do you have a Japan fund? [00:51:41] Because they’re, they got this granular asset allocation, you know, that was way too granular. Like, why, why are we not at least opening that up and just being Asia, right? Just, you know, why are we making the bet on, bet on one country? Jesse, do you guys see that in the practice that you work in, uh, people over obsessing with asset allocation? [00:52:00] Jesse: Occasionally. One thing I will say is generally the people who were working with us, they don’t. This is probably true of a lot of financial planners where it’s like, the reason why you’re seeking out professional help is because you might not want to really care about your asset allocation all that much. [00:52:15] You wanna focus on other areas of your life. But when it comes to my podcast audience or my blog readers and the who are largely DIYers, that’s where I’ll get comments in saying, Hey, Jesse, you know, I, I started this portfolio out thinking I’d be 70% stocks, 30% bonds, and you know what happened last year? [00:52:33] And I’m, I’m, I just, I see it drifting. It’s closer to 71 29 right now, and I’m just, I’m growing a little concerned, right? We’re just questions like that. I think we’re, we’re all probably familiar with questions here similar to that. And that’s where, as Paula set the stage in my head, I was just thinking they’re missing the forest for the trees. [00:52:50] And as soon as she said that, I was like, yes, that is the perfect thing to say. It truly is missing the bigger picture for the trees. But. A lot of people also just say, what is wrong with a hundred percent V-T-S-A-X-V-T-I, a hundred percent stocks for every single part of my life, no matter how old I am or what my goals are? [00:53:05] What is wrong with that? And that’s also the wrong approach. It, it just simply is, [00:53:11] Joe: Paul, I’m gonna meet you halfway on two areas. Number one is somebody just starting out who’s worried about asset allocation, that drives me crazy. Like just starting out. Those are the people, Jesse, that need to be doing the V-T-S-A-X. [00:53:24] Paula: They’re like, oh, I’ve got a thousand dollars to invest. How do I allocate it? [00:53:27] Joe: Right? I wanna buy five stocks or whatever. And then the second thing is though, and, and I’ll meet you part way here, I don’t think asset allocation, I like that first word asset. Picking the actual thing inside of the asset class. [00:53:42] Which Markowitz proved like security [00:53:43] Jesse: selection. Security selection. Yeah. Security selection. [00:53:47] Joe: Yeah. Like Markowitz proved, it’s the asset class. Generally that matters far more than picking the specific stock inside of that asset class. So if you are gonna worry about something, worrying about, and, and I find that newbies really worry about what stock to buy, then I think Jesse, they graduate to where you are, which is, or, or Paula, what you’re talking about, which is then they graduate to worrying about, am I 30% or 29% in, in this this asset class, which is beautiful state. [00:54:14] I also [00:54:14] Jordan: think we, we kind of get it wrong based on our age too. So I think with young people, the biggest. Return for them is gonna be the money they put in through accumulating wealth, through working, or their businesses, et cetera. So for someone just beginning putting money in something like V-T-S-A-X makes a lot of sense because honestly, where they’re really going to build their wealth is how much money they put in. [00:54:38] Now take someone who’s in their forties or fifties and they’re starting to think about making less money and decumulating them decumulating, that’s when asset allocation can actually really start changing things. And I think this is a lot of what you Joe talk about, and Paul Erman talks about long-term, when you’re talking about decumulation, having the right asset mix could possibly lead to much higher withdrawal rates. [00:55:01] And so I think for young people, it’s like, dude, make lots of money and just make sure it’s in the market, make sure it’s in something decent. But as you get older, then it makes a lot more sense to start really paying attention to those asset allocations. If you choose to be someone who’s really trying to improve things on the margin, like they’re gonna be some people who are lazy like me, and they’re gonna say, well. [00:55:19] I get it, but I’m not interested in that extra, you know, half a percent or percent. I’m okay with doing less work, but for the people who really are interested and excited that that’s really when they, when you wanna start looking at things, [00:55:30] Joe: I think scientifically you get above a hundred thousand dollars saved. [00:55:33] That’s when you should get more, a little more granular, but we’ll leave that for another day. That’s, that’s another, another part of the battle that we’ll do another day. Maybe don’t afford anything, Paula, where, uh, you and I think have that discussion coming up. Yeah. We’re gonna get granular. We do. We do. [00:55:50] Yes. Wait, let’s transition to that. Let’s find out. That’s a good place to leave this discussion. Let’s talk about what’s going on, where you guys are, Paula, uh, kick this off. What’s going on on Afford Anything [00:55:59] Paula: on the Afford Anything podcast, you join me for a discussion. We, this is actually kind of a series of discussions that we’ve been having for a while about asset allocation, about the efficient frontier. [00:56:10] If you want to get beyond simply V-T-S-A-X and Chill and you want to start. Asset allocating in something more than just that total stock market index fund or more than just the s and p 500. What should you do? You know, should you construct a four fund portfolio, a 10 fund portfolio, how much effort will it take? [00:56:30] How do you determine which funds to buy? Joe, you walk us through all of that. So, and you, you do so sort of over a series of episodes and, and each one kind of keeps getting better and better. So those are all of our recent q and a episodes. I’m just trying to troll all those [00:56:44] Joe: VTS a Xers [00:56:46] Paula: one [00:56:46] Joe: at a time as much as I possibly can. [00:56:49] And that’s at the Afford Anything Show? [00:56:50] Paula: Yes, on the Afford Anything podcast. [00:56:52] Joe: Abso. And that episode, by the way that you’re talking about, specifically the one where we kind of walk through it, step one, step two, step three, you really wanna be on the Afford Anything YouTube channel? [00:57:00] Paula: Yes, absolutely. For that one, yeah. [00:57:01] youtube.com/afford anything because there’s charts, there’s graphs, we’re we go all out. [00:57:07] Joe: A lot of graphics. We’ll go to the bestselling author last. It’s very graphic. Jesse, what’s, what’s going on at the Best Interest podcast? Man, you’ve got a big, can we talk about your milestone coming up first? [00:57:19] Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:57:21] Well, I mean, well, we, we’ve got a, a few interesting, because Doc G’s episode came out today. Awesome discussion, but in a couple episodes, we’ve got episode 100. The big century. This is so great. Uh, a century of episodes for the Best Interest podcast. You know, it started with, uh, I mean the funny thing is we joke about recording in the basement here. [00:57:40] I think my early episodes I was actually in the basement, certainly sounded like I was in a basement. I also sounded like I didn’t know how to speak the English language. And here we are. A hundred episodes later. So it’s, it’s been a big journey, [00:57:51] Joe: which shows if Jesse can do it, anybody can do it. Actually, to be serious for a second, the average podcast lasts seven episodes. [00:58:01] Mm. And so to reach a big, big number, like a hundred episodes, and by the way, to see the guest lineup, you’ve had those first a hundred episodes, has been, that’s, it’s, it’s phenomenal. [00:58:12] Jesse: It’s a thank you. Thank you, Joe. [00:58:13] Joe: It is great, man. Especially the last one. [00:58:16] Jesse: That’s true. That’s true. My mom, my mom always said I was about 14 times better than average, and here we are today. [00:58:25] Joe: Oh, the math humor runs in the family then, Jesse, huh? [00:58:28] Jesse: Oh yeah. Is it a family of [00:58:29] Joe: engineers? Is that the deal? It runs [00:58:31] Jesse: deep. Uh, my dad was a biology teacher. My mom was an English teacher. [00:58:34] Joe: Oh. That’s a wild wow meeting of the minds. Mm-hmm. [00:58:39] Jesse: And I ended up like this. Yeah. [00:58:42] Joe: You ended up on the Stacking Benjamin. [00:58:43] Show your parents like, what happened, doc G what’s going on besides, you know, being on the the Amazing book tour? What’s going on at Earn and Invest? [00:58:54] Jordan: Well, you know, after winning the first trivia of the year on the Stacking Benjamin Show, I was thinking of packing it in and doing nothing for the rest of the year. [00:59:01] Actually that was, that was it. I’m done. But if I happen to go forward with the episodes, I have planned yesterday’s episode and I’m saying yesterday ’cause we’re, we’re recording this. It’s gonna be in the future. But actually today, Joe and I did a community episode where we talked about a Yahoo Finance Marist poll that they did of 3000 banked individuals and asked them how satisfied they were with their savings in 2024. [00:59:29] You can hear us discuss the results with community member Matt Sly as well as Jos and I. We tried to do a community episode once a month. This one is coming a little early, but I’m excited to have this conversation that’s on Earn and Invest. Wait a minute, you still do community episodes? I still do once a month, usually the last Thursday of the month, but since I have some rewind episodes coming up, this is the second to the last Thursday of the month. [00:59:54] This, this month [00:59:55] Joe: I was in a forum where I read somebody saying that, uh, that like Doc G used to do those community episodes. I’m like, when did he quit? He never stopped. There hasn’t been one in a month. It’s a good time. And to give people just a little preview of that doc, people generally not, not, not feeling it, not so happy [01:00:13] Jordan: with their savings. [01:00:13] Um, kind of pessimistic, but I think we gave it a, you know, optimistic spin towards the end. [01:00:20] Joe: We did. And how can you not with, uh, Matt, who’s a great community member of yours. It’s such a, such a nice guy. And that’s on earn and Invest. All right, that’s gonna do it for today. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody on YouTube. [01:00:31] Thank you also to our contributors. Doug is also gonna thank our contributors in a moment, and we’ll see you guys back on Monday. Doug, what are our big three takeaways from today’s show? [01:00:42] Doug: Well, Joe first takes some advice from the single nicest and most passive nonviolent contributor on the show, Jesse Kramer. [01:00:50] He told us exactly the right time to invest. Uh, uh, I was listening, Jesse, but I mean, I I was a little distracted. Uh, could you tell us again when the right time is to invest? [01:01:01] Jesse: Whether you’re an alpha or a beta, it’s okay to be a little dinghy. [01:01:08] Doug: Might not have answered the question, but it sure was good. We’ll take it second. Take this from a resident crazy cat lady Paula Pant. She said people worry too much about black swan events. Paula, I think you’re. Uniquely qualified to tell us how Black Swan events are exactly like a cat’s butt. [01:01:30] Paula: Can you walk us through that again? [01:01:31] Absolutely. Actually, black swan events and cat’s butts are similar in three ways, so both are hard to control, both are totally unpredictable and both can be incredibly disruptive Surprises. [01:01:52] Jordan: I think you have to end there, Doug. I don’t think we can add any more to that. [01:01:59] Doug: What I knew of a big lesson, what I learned was that if you wanna become a Brazilian air, don’t try getting into ladies lingerie because there are no verified underwear billionaires. However, there are at least 33 billionaires in Brazil. Either way, my new term is a thing and I just trademarked it. Thanks to Dr. [01:02:22] Jordan Grommet for joining us today. You’ll find Doc G’s Earn and Invest podcast wherever you are listening to us right now. You’ll also find Jesse Kramer’s best interest podcast on whatever platform. You’re listening to us right now as well, and we’re gonna include links in our show notes for both shows at Stacking Benjamins dot com. [01:02:41] And finally, let’s thank Paula Pant from Afford Anything for joining us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast. Afford anything? I think we gotta thank Paula’s Pant. Paul’s pant. Paul’s Paula’s cat, Paula’s cat, Paul’s pants. Yeah. This show is the property of SB Podcast LLC, copyright 2025 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. [01:03:05] Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. [01:03:27] This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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